Snake in the Barn!

No, I didn't hold a political event in our barn today with a politician giving a campaign speech.  I'm talking about a literal snake in the barn.  After I got in from work, I changed into my work clothes and Tricia and I headed to the barn and called in the 'girls' for the late afternoon milking.  After cleaning them up, hobbling one of their legs, and giving them a little dairy ration and alfalfa, we started to milk them.  Benjamin came in the barn with his egg basket to collect the eggs.  The chickens lay primarily in some nesting boxes made out of milk crates, but there is one nest under the counter by Rosie's milking stall.  Well, an event occurred that had all the ladies standing around gossipping and carrying on for quite a while afterwards:

"Did you hear what happened in the barn?"

When Benjamin came to check that nest, he shouted, "Dad, a snake!"  It created quite a commotion in the barn.  We both put our milking buckets down and I grabbed a shovel.  As I suspected, this wasn't a bad snake.  It was a Texas Rat Snake.  We call them chicken snakes because they are often found in barns and like to eat eggs.  They look kind of scary because they can get real big and they are great climbers and can hang on rafters and from trees.  I've seen them get as large as eight feet long.  This one was a juvenile and was only around three feet long.

To be honest, I didn't want to kill him at first, but I quickly changed my mind. Wives and snakes don't mix well in close proximity to one another.  Although we need assistance killing the rats in the barn, the snakes also eat our eggs and we can't have that, can we?  After some theatrics, I managed to kill the snake and threw him out to the chickens.

Well what do we have here?

The hens were very curious and encircled the poor old snake.

They pecked at him trying to figure out how to eat him.  Chickens are omnivores and will feast on snake meat like nobodies' business.

The predator becomes the prey

There were no mysterious bulges in the snake so he hadn't had a chance to eat an egg recently.  I bet he had just slithered in from the woods.  We do have some fake eggs made of chalk and wood that we keep in the nesting boxes in the barn specifically to combat snakes.  The snakes will eat the fake egg and won't be able to constrict/crush/digest it like they would a real egg and would end up dying.  We had a couple of the fake eggs that went missing and I later found them under the floor to the feed room in the barn.  The remains of the snakes that ate them had already rotted away.

After the snake was disposed of, we went back to milking and Benjamin completed his egg gathering. Nothing like a little excitement to shake our normal routine up!